DOE Seeks Next-Gen Supercomputer Developer

The Department of Energy is seeking potential vendors capable of building the next exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

While no specifics were detailed by the facility in its request for proposal, the next ORNL supercomputer, to be called the Discovery, is expected to have three to five times more computational power compared to Frontier, the existing ORNL supercomputer, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, capable of performing at 1.206 exaflops on the High-Performance Linpack benchmark.

Discovery will be used in several research initiatives, including climate change prediction, high-energy physics data research and green energy solution development.

Interested parties can submit their proposals until Aug. 30, ORNL said.

Georgia Tourassi, associate laboratory director of computing and computational sciences at ORNL, said the new supercomputer will support the scientific community in advancing issues that cannot be proven by experiment, observation or theory alone.

The DOE has been allocating a significant chunk of its budget to supporting initiatives that advance supercomputer use. In May, the department collaborated with the National Science Foundation to award 35 projects funding to make resources more accessible to organizations involved in responsible AI development.